LIN102H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Regular And Irregular Verbs, Jean Berko Gleason, Tabula Rasa
6 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
Early theories of language acquisition were heavily influenced by behaviorism: true initial 1950"s, with the revolution of linguistics. There is imitation involved, but children do not simply imitate. They apply the rules they have developed wrongly to create forms such as holded, foots, etc. this is called overgeneralization. When children deliberately try to imitate what they hear, they are unable to produce sentences that they would not spontaneously produce. Children tend to be corrected based on the truth-values of sentences, not on grammaticality. This means by hearing a sentence and using it as a sample to form other sentences : this cannot be the case. Children learn a rule for moving the auxiliary that is sensitive to synaptic structure, not to linear order. Children are able to learn language because adults speak to them in a simplified language, called baby-talk. In some cultures, adults do not use a special register to speak to children.
